What You Need to Know About New Cardinals Coach Jonathan Gannon

He doesn’t have a signature scheme, but his background makes him uniquely built for this. Oh, and he has thoughts on Kyler Murray.

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I probably think the Jonathan Gannon hire is more interesting than you do. And that’s because of my knowledge of his background, which I figured we’d share with you here to introduce the Cardinals coach.

As I see it, that really starts with one thing he pointed out to me Sunday morning.

“I have no scheme,” he said.

Of course, he knew that needed more explanation.

“And they’re like, You're a f---ing idiot. Great, you’re going to get fired,” he said, laughing. “But literally, I don’t. I don’t even have a playbook.”

And that still needs more explanation. “It’s in my brain,” he continued, and the 41-year-old didn’t mean that in some sort of arrogant or all-knowing. Moreso, it’s founded on a belief system that grew from another fact about Gannon—“I have no tree, like, literally.” Take a look at his background, and you’ll see. It’s true.

Gannon at his introductory press conference :: Rob Schumacher/The Republic/USA TODAY Sports

His college coach, Bobby Petrino, brought him to the NFL in 2007. That didn’t go well. But he wanted to stay in the league. So then Rams GM Billy Devaney, who’d been with him in Atlanta, took him to St. Louis in ’09, where he met Josh McDaniels in ’11. After that, he hooked on with Mike Munchak in Tennessee for two years before Mike Zimmer, the Falcons’ ’07 DC, hired him in Minnesota in ’14. After that, McDaniels hired him to the Colts staff in ’18, only McDaniels never got there. He stuck around anyway and met Nick Sirianni.

And it’s off Sirianni’s Eagles staff that Gannon was hired in Arizona, and to Arizona that Gannon will bring all that background, and a philosophy raised through it.

“The affinity I have for [Bill] Belichick and Josh—80% of the people in the NFL right now just play their stuff, and they really don’t give a damn about who they’re playing or matchups, or, they’re just concentrated on their stuff,” Gannon says. “Like if this is my scheme, this is what I do. Twenty percent of people in the NFL structure, they game-plan with their players and their opponent in mind.

“So that’s what I mean by adaptability, like we look different each week. It could be the same structures or it could be some of the same coverages, but we’re doing different things. I take the menu, and we got enough in our book where you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. But that’s what I mean by adapting.”

So if you want to know what Cardinals owner Michael Bidwill and new GM Monti Ossenfort were buying into with Gannon, it’s right there—the bet that his ability to build adaptability into a defense will work across an entire program and become a sort of bespoke setup for the talent across the board that’s on hand.

With that in mind, I figured it’d be fun to see what Gannon took from a few places on the way to landing the Arizona job.

• The origins of Gannon’s emphasis on adaptability actually came in his first year in the league—that 2007 Falcons season was, to put it lightly, different. Or as Gannon put it, “a complete trainwreck.”

“We think we’re going to win the NFC South,” Gannon says. “We get done with OTAs, and Bobby’s like, ‘Dude, Mike Vick is going to be the MVP of the league this year.’ And two weeks later he goes to prison. Literally, we were on summer break when we found that out.”

Falcons GM Rich McKay was so confident the Vick situation wouldn’t be a problem, in fact, that he’d traded Matt Schaub months earlier, and didn’t pursue any sort of high-end backup in case things went the wrong way. Which turned the next steps into a fire drill, put the season in a blender and, in time, led to Petrino’s departure for Arkansas with three games left in the season.

“That’s the other part of adapting. It’s just like they asked me in the presser, What’s this last three days been for you? And I said, Normal,” Gannon says. “And the point of that is you don’t know what’s going to come through your door. You don’t know what’s going to happen in a day. … Like, Oh, I wanted this guy to hire this guy yesterday, and it didn’t work out. So adapt and adjust. What are we going to do? Quit because the quarterback went to jail? You gotta figure it out.”

One other thing happened that year—Gannon worked with, and learned from, longtime NFL assistant Emmitt Thomas. That December, Petrino offered Gannon the chance to coach DBs at Arkansas. Thomas told him, “If you want to coach football, go with Bobby. If you want to coach football in the NFL, stay in the NFL.” Devaney told Gannon he wanted to bring him to St. Louis after getting the Rams’ GM job in 2008, but that he’d have to wait a year. Gannon went to work in private equity for that year, then went to the Rams in 2009.

• Gannon spent three years in scouting in St. Louis, one on the college side, the last two on the pro side, and that last year bonded with the new OC, McDaniels, whose dad was close with Gannon’s high school coach, Chuck Kyle (the two are among the greatest coaches in Ohio prep football history).

“And he starts putting me through the wringer,” Gannon says. “I’m a pro scout at the time, so I’m working with the coaches. I’m not on the road. I’m in the building every day. That was the day Billy was going to move me into an area. I think he was going to put me in the Midwest just as an area [scout]. He’s like ‘You know what, Jonathan? You’d like to get back into coaching, you gotta be around these coaches and learn the pro scouting side.’ So that’s when Josh and my relationship took off.

“He liked me because I was a f---ing grinder, and I loved him because of the personality and his brain.”

McDaniels introduced Gannon to the Patriots’ way of thinking, and challenged him—over and over and over. And that continued after McDaniels went back to New England and Gannon to Tennessee to coach again, with the two meeting at the combine every year and whenever else they could to share information, and, for Gannon at least, to learn.

• After two years of dues paying in Nashville, Gannon would find his two stops that shaped him as a defensive coach. The first one was Minnesota, where Zimmer paid off a promise to hire him after not having a post-Atlanta spot for him in Cincinnati.

“Zim was a mastermind with his scheme, and that’s how he was really, really good,” Gannon says. “His scheme was better than almost everyone out there. His brain was better than who he was going against. But I will say this—as the game changed, I started to see, we need to start changing a little bit. And he did too at the end.”

After that, McDaniels paid off another promise, similar to Zimmer’s, that he’d get Gannon on his staff when he took his second shot as a head coach. The only problem was that, by the time Gannon got to Indy as DBs coach, McDaniels was no longer headed there, leaving Gannon to work with Frank Reich, and McDaniels’s pick for DC—another Ohio guy—Matt Eberflus.

“Zim obviously was in the top five every year, but Josh is like, ‘Dude, every time we play you, here’s what we do,’” Gannon says. “You gotta figure out a different way. What I got with ’Flus, it was a completely new scheme. And one I was a little uncomfortable with, because it was a complete different way of playing than Zim played. But I dove all in, I learned it, and there's elements of ’Flus's system that we do because they are really good complements to what Zim’s system is.”

• The two finalists for the job in Philly in 2021, after Doug Pederson was fired, were McDaniels and Sirianni. Both wanted Gannon as coordinator, but Sirianni figured the Eagles would want a more experienced DC. So he suggested Steve Wilks. The Eagles’ brass, having heard from McDaniels already, responded, ‘What about Jonathan Gannon?’ Sirianni didn’t have to be asked twice. And being with Sirianni in Philly, different from when the two were together in Indy, opened up the final pieces Gannon needed as a prospective head coach.

“Being the head coach, here’s what he added to my game—I’m a little … I don't mind having balls in the air,” he says. “I don't mind like, Heyyy, we’ll kind of figure this out. I don’t mind a little bit of gray. Nick Sirianni is the most detailed person I’ve ever been around. And honestly, there’s part of me at times that fought it, and it just, honestly, took my game to another level. And not to say that I’m not still O.K. living in the gray, but there are some things that made my game better when he made me detail them out.”

The other thing he took was what sort of staff he’d want. A good amount of the coaches in Philly were around the same age, had kids the same age, and that fostered a closely knit group that evolved into a think tank.

“Shane [Steichen] and I were boys. I love Jeff Stoutland. And the point of that is, now there’s no silos,” he says. “If I had a question about something in a defensive room, I would go right into the offensive staff and be like Shane, Stout, Brian [Johnson], Nick—help me out with this. And they would. And we would do the same.”

The early signs indicate the Cardinals’ staff will be similar, with a 35-year-old OC, in former Browns QBs coach Drew Petzing, and a 29-year-old DC, in former Eagles LBs coach Nick Rallis.

Add all of it together and, yeah, I’d say there’s reason to be excited about Gannon. I know the Cardinals are, and it’s not without reason.

That brings us to the other part of this—the pairing of Gannon and Ossenfort isn’t haphazard, nor is the idea of Gannon coaching Kyler Murray. As we detailed last week, the genesis of the relationship between the new GM and coach was Ossenfort’s effort last summer to get to know more young coaches across the NFL. The two quickly hit it off, with Ossenfort seeing Gannon as having an it factor and some of the Patriots ties the two had (Ossenfort from working there, Gannon through McDaniels) generating chemistry.

“That’s it right there,” Gannon says. “His vision of how to build a winning program is what excited me about talking to Monti. Honestly, he believes in what I believe in, about players, how to build a roster, about intangibles, about between-the-margin positions, premium positions, how to sustain with roster turnover and who to pay, who not to pay, how to deal with rookie contracts, all of that. I really feel like we hit it off in the summer. His vision for how to be the GM fit with my vision of who I wanted to pair up.”

Murray, at Gannon's introductory press conference, will have a new head coach to work with for the first time in his NFL career :: Rob Schumacher/The Republic/USA TODAY Sports

And then, there was the quarterback. Gannon knows as well as anyone that taking the Cardinals job meant taking on Murray as a quarterback. He knows, of course, there are mixed feelings on Murray around the NFL. But his view of Murray is clear.

“Elite,” Gannon says. “I'll be honest with you: Probably—not probably—the hardest game plans I had to do this year were Kansas City and Arizona. And that stood out with me. That stuck out in my mind, like, F---ing A, this guy, and you talk about the other players he had with him, the scheme, all of it … This player’s skill set is a legit problem for a defense, because he can put you in all kinds of conflict, he can beat you with his legs and with his arm, like Jalen [Hurts] does. And that’s what excited me about him, is having gone against him, having watched all the tape on him, studying that.

“I'll just say this: I’ve talked to the guy every day since I’ve been here. I love the guy so far.”